Although I posted a three-card combo which is greater than the sum of its parts, I do believe each pair of within that triple also has neat features, albeit on a more modest scale.

Market Square and Monastery: if your hand contains two Monasteries and at least one Market Square, gaining Gold by playing the Monastery buffs the second.

Market Square and Rats: while the Market Squares are gaining Gold, the Rats are gaining more trashers. Yes, you obviously need an exit strategy that'll deal with all those Rats but in the meantime you get more uses out of Market Square more quickly than usual.

Although I posted a three-card combo which is greater than the sum of its parts, I do believe each pair of within that triple also has neat features, albeit on a more modest scale.

Market Square and Monastery: if your hand contains two Monasteries and at least one Market Square, gaining Gold by playing the Monastery buffs the second.

Market Square and Rats: while the Market Squares are gaining Gold, the Rats are gaining more trashers. Yes, you obviously need an exit strategy that'll deal with all those Rats but in the meantime you get more uses out of Market Square more quickly than usual.

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That said, I do kind of like Rats + Monastery.

Well a hand of Monastery / Monastery / Market Square / Copper / Copper is pretty sad because you need to find a card costing $2 or less to buy in order to activate any Monasteries, and then the Gold was unneeded to trash both Coppers. Having an Estate there instead of a Copper is even worse. Draw is necessary to make this interaction efficient, though that draw can be terminal.

If anything, it's more interesting to use Market Square's +Buy as a cheap way to get +buy to power up Monastery. After you are pretty thin, then you can think about triggering Market Square with Monastery for Gold. They take turns helping each other basically.

Although I do agree that this thread is for 2 card interactions (Although you can't tell unless you scroll back for days examining all the posts), it still bugs me when people say that 3 card interactions aren't useful. They are.

Trying to memorize all the 3-card interactions in the game is a waste of time compared to other stuff you could be doing to get better at the game.

Man, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect people to read the OP before posting in a thread

Maybe; maybe not.

But it's definitely unreasonable to expect people to read the OP of a three-year-old thread again before posting in it when the subject line is both misleading and almost identical to that of another almost identical thread.

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the purpose of the thread is to memorize all the combos that get posted in it

CardA + CardB + [category] is a reasonable thing to post as a neat and potentially useful card interaction.

For example, Tunnel + Apprentice + [sifter] gets lots of free gold that Apprentice can use to draw large hands. Of course, that could be further generalized to Apprentice + [free gold] is good, but you get the point. There are enough sifters in the game to make a combination like that relevant. Likewise, categories like [+buy] or even [draw] are reasonable; there are certainly good two-card combinations that aren't good unless there is a third piece to the puzzle.

But even that compromise suggests a bigger-picture issue if you're thinking about posting a multi-card interaction.

In another thread, someone posted a video of a Dan Books turn 6 win as a result of something like a 4-card combination (Storeroom, Talisman, Villa, Peddler) He used Storeroom to put multiple Talismans together, did a buy-one-get-three Villa, Repeat until empty accumulating ridiculous buys, buy out the Peddler pile, then buy out a third cheap pile for a win (on Wolf den points, but could probably have pulled off a win on a couple of Estates instead.)

Posting that 4-card combination is useless, but the individual combinations are worth noting. But even then, the more general synergies are probably more important to get in your head than the specific combinations. Not Villa + Talisman, but Villa + [gainer], Peddler + buy, Talisman + buy, Talisman + sifting, Storeroom + special treasure, etc.

As a general rule, I would suggest to anyone thinking about posting in this thread, ask yourself this question: Is it really neat? As in, is there something unique that that two-card combination does? Could you not substitute another card for one of the others and achieve exactly the same result?

Why do we need qualifiers? We should just start a thread called simply "Dominion card interactions".

Because we need a thread whose entire contents people can memorize to get better at the game. Posting your fun moments is fine and all, but can't we have just one thread whose goal is to actually make people improve at Dominion?

Why do we need qualifiers? We should just start a thread called simply "Dominion card interactions".

Because we need a thread whose entire contents people can memorize to get better at the game. Posting your fun moments is fine and all, but can't we have just one thread whose goal is to actually make people improve at Dominion?

I really like that IDEA, but forums are not ideal for storing information. Sometimes you'll get an enthusiastic sir that will continuously edit their own first post with each update, but that rarely lasts long.

Seems like you would want a thread where people can discuss the interactions they've found, and a few warriors that will regularly update an "every 2-card synergy" page on the wiki. The wiki would allow multiple people and new people to join in on the maintenance, and for someone like me, would allow hovering to see what each card is.

Posting your fun moments is fine and all, but can't we have just one thread whose goal is to actually make people improve at Dominion?

Discussion and debate is part of the process. I've learned quite a bit from someone posting something not all that great and being hog-piled by experts telling them why it's not that great.

What I would really like to see, though, is a compilation of actually good stuff from this thread (and others) that makes it into the wiki in a nice, clean, simplified version.

It's definitely worth listing interactions that are neat and interesting that don't rise to the level of "combo" but are nevertheless useful. There's a TON of stuff in this thread that would be far more useful on the wiki than Golem + Counting House.

Why do we need qualifiers? We should just start a thread called simply "Dominion card interactions".

Because we need a thread whose entire contents people can memorize to get better at the game. Posting your fun moments is fine and all, but can't we have just one thread whose goal is to actually make people improve at Dominion?

I feel like the way to do this is to have the OP continually kept up to date with the interactions that qualify as useful that people have mentioned. Any other system requires people to read through 26 pages of posts, deciding for themselves which ones are useful or not. If the idea is to have a simple list that can be memorized; that list needs to be all in 1 post.

Think of it as the Qvist card rankings. People like to see the results posted after everyone's input has been gathered up and aggregated. It wouldn't be very useful if everyone just had to look at every person's submissions and calculate on their own which cards are better than which other cards.

*Edit* Just saw Weesh's reply; yeah the Wiki would serve much better than a continually-updated OP.

I'm pretty sure Awaclus was being facetious about memorizing card interactions, but I could be wrong.

BTW, I finally went back and looked at the OP. This thread didn't do so well at the beginning, but has been doing great recently until this diversion. I didn't know there was a 2-card restriction, but it seemed like that's what people were posting, and it makes sense.

I rarely look at the wiki for card combos, but I regularly read this thread. It's searchable and you have a lot of context for how good the interaction is (feedback, who posted it, how many upvotes, WHO upvoted it) that you don't have on a wiki.

Like, Chancellor/Stash is listed on the wiki right next to Capital/Mandarin.

In any case, the transitory nature of posts here is a bitter fit for how consequential most of these are. If they are really good, and really important, they'll probably get their own article, or at least get discussed frequently enough to be widely seen.

I'm pretty sure Awaclus was being facetious about memorizing card interactions, but I could be wrong.

For each card, I literally (try to) remember all the relevant 2-card combinations it has. As a result, it takes me seconds to analyze kingdoms that would otherwise take minutes. As a result of that, I make better decisions during the game because I didn't waste the entirety of my attention span analyzing the kingdom at the start of the game. I wrote an article about this too: http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=18108.0

I'm pretty sure Awaclus was being facetious about memorizing card interactions, but I could be wrong.

For each card, I literally (try to) remember all the relevant 2-card combinations it has. As a result, it takes me seconds to analyze kingdoms that would otherwise take minutes. As a result of that, I make better decisions during the game because I didn't waste the entirety of my attention span analyzing the kingdom at the start of the game. I wrote an article about this too: http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=18108.0

I remember that article. But I got the sense that you were fitting cards into archetypes and analyzing the combinations of those archetypes, rather than doing a mental query of specific card combos. I guess it's something in between?

"Capital... is Counterfeit/Herbalist/Mandarin present?"

The trick seems to be your "key card" ranking that you make when analyzing the kingdom.

I'm pretty sure Awaclus was being facetious about memorizing card interactions, but I could be wrong.

For each card, I literally (try to) remember all the relevant 2-card combinations it has. As a result, it takes me seconds to analyze kingdoms that would otherwise take minutes. As a result of that, I make better decisions during the game because I didn't waste the entirety of my attention span analyzing the kingdom at the start of the game. I wrote an article about this too: http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=18108.0

I remember that article. But I got the sense that you were fitting cards into archetypes and analyzing the combinations of those archetypes, rather than doing a mental query of specific card combos. I guess it's something in between?

"Capital... is Counterfeit/Herbalist/Mandarin present?"

The trick seems to be your "key card" ranking that you make when analyzing the kingdom.

Well, this is getting a bit tangential, but I try to abstract as much as I can. For some things, you have to do specific card + specific card, but for some others, you can do specific card + archetype or archetype + archetype, and then you just have to remember all the archetypes that each card is. Also the result of that can be a key thing on its own (e.g. Capital + Mandarin), or it can actually just be another thing that fits into a certain archetype (e.g. Capital + Counterfeit = payload).

To get back on subject, here's a 3-card combo:Sauna | Avanto | Leprechaun3 Saunas and 3 Avantos (or 3/2 and whatever else) are a pretty good way to have Lep be your 7th card, with still having actions left. And Sauna/Silver can clean up any unwanted Golds.

To get back on subject, here's a 3-card combo:Sauna | Avanto | Leprechaun3 Saunas and 3 Avantos (or 3/2 and whatever else) are a pretty good way to have Lep be your 7th card, with still having actions left. And Sauna/Silver can clean up any unwanted Golds.

EDIT: I guess Silver makes this a 4-card combo - does it still count?

It's still "potentially useful," since Silver is in every kingdom and Saunavanto is a single pile.

If we really want to be pendantic, though, the native plural is "avannot."

Oh, you meant Messenger/Counting House! And it even comes with +buy to take advantage of all that extra coin, and it comes with a free Copper for you and your opponent! And early you can even use the +buy to buy extra Coppers to make Counting House even better!